The DEA's budget hit $3.2 billion in fiscal year 2025, up from $1.5 billion in 2000, and overdose deaths in America topped 100,000 annually for three straight years starting in 2021. The agency grew. The problem grew with it. This is not coincidence. Every dollar Congress shovels into the DEA makes the black market more profitable, not less. Higher enforcement costs raise the price premium for illegal drugs, which rewards the suppliers ruthless enough to survive the crackdown and drives out the cautious ones. Users pay more at the street level, the cartel earns more per kilogram, and fentanyl replaces heroin because fentanyl is 50 times more potent by weight and infinitely easier to smuggle past checkpoints. Failure produces more funding, not reform. Congress rewards the agency for proving the problem persists. The economic logic is simple. Prohibition creates artificial scarcity and hands the entire revenue stream to organizations that operate outside law. The DEA does not suppress that market; it selects for its most violent and adaptive participants. You fund this through your taxes. The agency takes your money, makes your streets more dangerous, then asks for a raise. Congress writes the check every single time.